The Dragon Lives Again (1977)

Bruce Lee went to Hell and while there he ended up in a war against Dracula, James Bond, the Godfather, Clint Eastwood's 'Man with No Name', Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman, the Exorcist, a racy Emanuelle, zombie skeletons, and mummies! Don't worry though, because Bruce had Popeye, The One-armed Swordsman, and Kwai Chang Caine (from 1970's Kung Fu, the role that should have gone to Bruce) on his side!

This movie was bonkers, trashy, stupid, extremely low budget, everything I should have run from. Instead I was drawn to any movie with the above characters going at each other! Objectively speaking I should have rated it lower, but it was so bad that it was funny and I gave it a ratings bump.

The plot was completely illogical. The whole story was simply an excuse to have the biggest cross-over event in kung fu history. I had to watch a badly dubbed version. It sounded like one man did all the men's voices and they all sounded like they had thick New York (USA) accents except for the Exorcist who had an outrageous French accent (Monty Python joke). This version had also been cut several times and parts of the action didn't always show on the screen. Thankfully, there weren't subtitles or they would have run off the screen.

The fights were funny with bizarre sound effects. Bruce would call out the names of his movies for some of his moves. Zatoichi received a Fist of Fury in a very sensitive area.

Fair warning, there was quite a bit of female nudity in this movie. Unwanted and unneeded in the context it was shown. There was also a lot of talk about Bruce's "third leg". I'll leave it at that. In the double standard department, Bruce didn't even take his shirt off in the final battle. How were we supposed to know when he'd had enough and gotten serious?!? My guess is that Bruce Leung wasn't in good enough shape to take his shirt off.

This movie was awful, truly awful. It was also hysterically funny in places. If you can handle so bad it's good movies, this is one of those. It would benefit you to have a friend with an absurd sense of humor to watch it with and a big bowl of popcorn. Just don't expect any of it to make any sense.

Read More